Serious damage will occur if we don’t detect and treat the cancer early.
Authentic core values, discovered and nurtured, are essential to building a healthy business. Even with so much written about core values, most entrepreneurs don’t fully realize their power or how best to leverage them, so don’t stop reading.
Without paying proper attention to our core health, toxic anti-values can embed and like a fast-moving cancer, metastasize and kill our business. Even second- and third-generation businesses are not immune. So, let’s get serious about this and take steps to take care of your business at its core.
On a practical level, a core value is something you, the business founder, care about deeply. Your core values evoke a strong emotional response when someone does or doesn't care about it like you do. Simply put, if a value doesn’t make you react strongly, it’s not core. If you don't get really angry when it is violated, it’s not core. A core value is something you are ready to go to war over. The opposite of a genuine core value, an anti-value, is something you recognize as hazardous to your core health—you address and remove it quickly.
Take this test:
Your business espouses three core values: “stay humble,” “do the right thing,” and “help first.” Bob is technically very solid in his seat. He gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to consistently deliver what his job requires. The problem is that Bob doesn’t care about two of your three core values and violates them regularly. He's quite arrogant, works to advance himself, and doesn’t do anything to help his teammates. So teammates really dislike working with Bob. But Bob gets the work done, and the customers seem happy with him.
As Bob’s manager, what do you do?
If you chose option A or B, you would embed a cancer cell that, in the early stages of the disease, will destroy the morale of your team. Your good people will start to leave because you didn’t protect the team and culture by defending the values you professed and they cared about. Hundreds of related, symptomatic aches and pains will arise from the untreated cancer at your core.
Remember, the best chance of survival depends on early detection, early treatment, and radical removal if needed. Every entrepreneur I’ve worked with that was slow to remove a cancerous team member wishes they had acted more quickly. They let the fear of addressing this issue allow them to tolerate a toxic employee that weakened their business from the inside out.
Actions for this week:
Set some time aside this week to work through these action steps. Then watch for my next article explaining how to evaluate team members using GWC—Get it, Want it, Capacity to do it.